Art Description :

🖤 Artist Statement  

by Bouzid Delaa

My artwork explores the thresholds that fracture and define us—where body meets mind, nature meets machine, mortality meets myth. In these intersections, I find tension and possibility. Through collage and monochrome photography, I create symbolic portraits that merge the intimate with the archetypal, the visceral with the abstract.

These works prioritize emotional realism over literal representation, mapping inner landscapes of turbulence, transformation, and memory. Using photography as a starting point, I disrupt its truth through digital layering, distortion, and fusion with anatomical, industrial, and organic elements. The result is an emotional architecture—fractured identities and suspended narratives where the body becomes a canvas for the 

Figures emerge as fluid, hybrid beings—faceless or masked, not to erase identity but to reflect its fragility and construction. They embody shared psychological landscapes shaped by memory, desire, loss, or oppression. By fusing flesh with machine, bone with wire, wing with chain, these works explore a world where human and non-human, natural and artificial, merge and dissolve.

Monochrome strips away context, leaving only shadow, light, and texture as a stage for contrasts—hope and despair, freedom and restraint, creation and ruin. These images engage the viewer in layered psychological and symbolic codes. Each piece dialogues between inner and outer worlds, exploring how identity is shaped by personal and cultural forces. Through surreal, fragmented anatomies, I embrace contradictions rather than resolve them, letting tension and ambiguity reveal deeper truths.

Art Movement Context and Comparative Analysis

My style lives at the crossroads of memory, myth, and machine. At its core, it’s about assembling fragments—bringing together pieces of photographs on a screen until they form something that feels like both a sculpture and a story. These aren’t just collages. They’re layered ecosystems, each one quietly wrestling with the body, the self, and the systems that shape them.

For me, collage isn’t just a method—it’s a language. It’s how I question, build, and unravel. The figures that appear in my work are often fragmented, mythic, and caught in a liminal space. They move through landscapes that are neither fully real nor fully imagined, but something in between—architectures made of thought, emotion, and memory. Through these constructed bodies, I explore transformation, post-human identity, gender ambiguity, beauty, decay, and control. Each image becomes a meditation on the fractured realities we live in—cultural, psychological, political.

My practice nods to Surrealism, Dadaist photomontage, and Symbolist art, but I treat those movements less as destinations and more as starting points. I’m interested in how artists before me used collage to destabilize stories and expose the subconscious—and I extend those strategies into a digital age. My compositions mirror the rhythm of contemporary life: layered, fast, contradictory, and constantly shifting in meaning.

I often find myself in conversation with artists like David Delruelle, Linder Sterling, and Wangechi Mutu. Delruelle’s crisp, monochromatic dreamscapes influence my sense of tone and contrast, but where his work is restrained, mine leans toward density. My images are thick with symbols—mechanical parts, celestial forms, natural textures, human anatomy—colliding in deliberate tension. From Linder Sterling, I’ve inherited an appreciation for disruption. Her punk-infused feminist collages break apart the familiar and force us to look again. While her juxtapositions shock, I aim for something quieter, more internal—a kind of emotional dissonance that lingers. And like Wangechi Mutu, I’m drawn to the hybrid body: figures that live outside fixed categories of race, gender, biology, or history. Her work reminds me that fragmentation isn’t always a wound—it can be a tool for survival, transformation, even myth-making.

What sets my work apart is how I approach collage as construction rather than mere composition. I build each piece like a structure—balanced, architected, and held together by its gravity. The figures I create don’t just sit in space; they shape it. They act as vessels for tension, ritual, narrative, and reflection. They’re not exactly real or imaginary, but possible—fragments of selves, archetypes, or inner lives that often go unspoken.

Though my work resonates with historical movements, I see it reaching toward something else—something emerging. I’m not simply extending the traditions of collage or photomontage. I’m searching for a new symbolic language, one that mirrors the complexity, disorientation, and hybridity of our time. We live in an age of constant reconstruction—of identities, technologies, histories. My work reflects that, not through chaos, but through composed fragmentation: through curated tension, silence, contrast, and form.

Whether it belongs to an existing movement or signals the start of a new one isn’t mine to decide. What matters to me is building images that hold weight—emotionally, symbolically, aesthetically. I’m drawn to contradiction, to mystery, to the space where intuition and precision meet. I want viewers to feel suspended in the same space I occupy while creating: one of searching, uncertainty, and transformation.